3D CAD NEWS

In the first day of its Mechanical Media Summit in Paris, Autodesk gave a confident and good-humored effort to its main message of the year: PLM is hogwash. All rise to Digital Prototyping.

Autodesk has never been a company to follow the footsteps of others, and is always happy to provide cud for the press herd to chew on. The subject of PLM versus, well, non-PLM, is a subject that often causes emotive arguments among the more vocal editors, and today has been no exception. Today’s presentations set tongues wagging, and a lot of conversation, but no one, except one editor I spoke to, was denying the attractiveness of Autodesk’s message.

So what is it? Digital Prototyping is Autodesk’s forward-thinking solution to the needs of manufacturers. Essentially, they are saying that PLM is not what customers are looking for. What they need is a way to experience and prove products prior to manufacture in the most efficient manner possible.

The apparent problem is the L in PLM. Lifecycle. But at the same time, Autodesk Mechanical keeps bringing up the issue, sans solutions at this point, about sustainable design practices. Sustainable as a word implies the whole issue of RoHS (Restrictions on Hazardous Substances). We may find out tomorrow that there is some life in the L word yet.

Rach

One of the top-secret 3D CAD News moles who has gone “deep cover” inside Autodesk Manufacturing surfaced just long enough this week to send the editorial team an encrypted message. When we ran it through our translator, we got the following message. “2 nu prod soon. PDM & SCM.” 

After several months of bad news for Dassault with regard to Airbus blaming its delayed production on its software, Dassault must have breathed a sigh of relief when it announced “a new era” in aerospace engineering, production planning and assembly simulation with the virtual roll out of the 787 Dreamliner. According to the December press release,”This first-ever virtual rollout, and the PLM technology underlying it, is not simply an animation of the completed airplane, but a virtual simulation and validation of the entire manufacturing process.”

The press release tends towards exuberant, but does impart some interesting ideas about the ability to create an entire aircraft in virtual space, prior to it being manufactured. Rather than just simulating the aircraft, Boeing is now using Dassault’s software to simulate the production lines and processes: “Such a digital manufacturing environment creates a communication “loop back” between 787 design and manufacturing engineers, no matter where they are, eliminating the risk of committing to a design change only to discover it cannot be manufactured, or that it requires costly changes to other components.”

The press release does not deliver any demos of this, but it would be cool to see quite how it works.